Outside of your business not even existing on Apple Maps (see How To Add a Business To Apple Maps), probably the worst thing that could happen at the moment is that your business is listed but it presents a negative image. This week at SMX East, I gave a talk on How To Optimize Your Business on Apple Maps and covered the two basic type of reputation management issues I have seen thus far:
Bad Photos
The business profile screen on Apple Maps plays a pretty cool slideshow made up of photos from your Yelp page. If you don’t have photos on your Yelp listing, then the satellite view of your location is shown. The problem is that if you have a bad picture, like say a cockroach in one of your hotel rooms, it don’t look too good:
If this is happening to you, you definitely want to upload some more photos to your Yelp business listing to push the cockroach down in the list. There’s no guarantee you can make it not show up, but if there are a lot of photos for your business, it’s less likely the bug will be seen.
Bad Reviews
The “Reviews” screen on the Apple Maps business profile shows the most recent three Yelp reviews for your business (sometimes I have seen them display in a different order – this is likely a data synchronization issue that will fix itself over time). Because there are so few reviews displayed so prominently, having even one negative review up there is not a good thing. For example:
In cases like these you’ll want to get some good reviews right away to push these bad ones down. There doesn’t seem to be a review “diversity” algorithm that favors display of different opinions, but at some point I am sure that will happen. For now though, a couple of good reviews can get rid of that asap. Remember that in order to avoid getting these good reviews filtered, you should make sure the reviewers have some connections on Yelp to other reviewers, particularly Elite reviewers in your area/niche.
A Tip About Yelp Tips
If you can’t get the reviews on Yelp.com, you can leave a “Tip” via the Apple Maps profile. New tips get immediately added to your profile on the Yelp mobile app and may eventually show up on your Apple Maps profile, pushing the bad stuff down. That said, my initial tests show that reviews from Yelp.com show up pretty fast on Apple Maps.
That’s all for now. Let me know if you figure anything else out. As I discover more about how the system works, I’ll let you know.
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